Patrick Reed is back in Dubai this week for the season-ending DP World Tour Championship. It's the scene, but not the golf course, of perhaps the most consequential week of his career.
Reed won the Dubai
Desert Classic in January at Emirates Golf Club and then decided not to renew his contract with LIV Golf , while the rival league was still getting full financial support from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.
He wanted a return to traditional golf. Reed lost in a playoff the following week in Bahrain, and then won the Qatar Masters. Just over two months later, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia shifted its strategy and pulled the plug on LIV Golf.
That left dozens of players scrambling to find a tour. Reed, meanwhile, secured his return to the PGA Tour by being among the top 10 in the Race to Dubai who didn't already have tour cards. He is No. 3 in the European ranking going into the final week.
“The year has been very satisfying,” Reed said Tuesday. “To kind of make that step and make the opportunity, to have to finish in the top 10 to earn my spot on the PGA Tour, and basically come out and believe in myself and put all my eggs in one basket and go get the job done, means a lot.”
Where he doesn't get satisfaction is seeing the plight of so many others who stayed with LIV and now will likely have to rely on sponsor exemptions to run-of-the-mill European tour events, waiting a year before they try to qualify for the PGA Tour.
“You never want to see guys struggle or have to sit out, things like that,” Reed said. “At the end of the day, a lot of those guys that are going through that are good friends of mine. You sit there, and you just hope that they are able to come out and do what I did — come out and play solid golf and come out on the PGA Tour.”
Shuri Sakuma wasn't even sure she could play in the Toto Classic in Japan at the start of the year. She wound up winning, and it wasn't a big surprise. Sakuma already had won four times on the Japan LPGA, and her fifth one gives her LPGA Tour membership.
She plans to defer that to next year.
Sakuma is the fourth first-time winner from Japan on the LPGA this season, a list that includes Shiho Kuwaki at the Women's British Open. She also is the 10th different Japanese player to have won on the LPGA the last two years.
Meanwhile, Erika Hara finished in a career-best third place at the Toto Classic, all but assuring she will be the LPGA rookie of the year. She has a 131-point lead over Youmin Hwang of South Korea (150 points for winning, 80 points for second) with two tournaments remaining.
Miles Russell will go from his fifth PGA Tour start of the year this week in Austin, Texas, to San Antonio. He joins Asterisk Talley at an American Junior Golf Association banquet on Nov. 21 to be honored as the Rolex Junior Players of the Year.
Russell joined Phil Mickelson as the only players to win the award three times since 2023 (Blades Brown won in 2024 before turning pro).
The 18-year-old Russell, who has committed to Florida State, won back-to-back in the Junior Invitational at Sage Valley, was runner-up in the U.S. Junior Amateur, was a semifinalist at the Western Amateur and tied for 39th in the U.S. Open. He made the cut in two other PGA Tour events and is playing the Austin Golf Championship this week.
Talley, a 17-year-old Californian who plans to go to Stanford, won three national junior titles this year. She won the U.S. Women's Amateur and tied for 22nd in the U.S. Women's Open at Riviera. She tied for 49th in another LPGA major, The Chevron Championship, and made the cut in two other LPGA events.
One difference in the two oldest golf championships is the U.S. Open has most sites selected all the way until Oakland Hills in 2051, when Blades Brown, a 19-year-old who just won the the World Wide Technology Championship, will be 44.
The R&A announced Monday that Carnoustie will host the British Open in 2029. That's as far out as the Open goes — St. Andrews in 2027, Royal Lytham & St. Annes in 2028, Carnoustie in 2029.
Carnoustie, reputed to be the toughest links on the rota, last hosted the British Open in 2018 when Francesco Molinari won his only major and Tiger Woods first began to show serious signs he was ready to win another major (he won the Masters the following year).
It will be ninth time for Carnoustie to host golf's oldest championship.
Turns out there’s more to Ryan Gerard than being an expert on travel deals and a player willing to travel halfway around the world to get to the Masters.
Part of his training in becoming a top-25 player in the world includes the violin.
“I played violin for a while growing up, like 10, 15 years,” Gerard said. “I think there’s something to understanding the rhythm of a putting stroke, and my feel is pretty attributed to what I hear. Being able to have that music background and understanding different kind of tempos, rhythms, sounds, I feel like it’s kind of made my feel as a golfer really sharp.
“My ears and eyes and everything kind of go together and (I) feel everything in a very distinct way.”
Nelly Korda won The Chevron Championship and jumped into a makeshift pool on the side of the 18th green at Memorial Park in Houston. The next winner of the LPGA major will get to jump into an actual pond.
Golf course architect Tom Doak returned to help redo the 18th hole by adding a pond down the right side of the green. It enables the winner to maintain the tradition of the major — which was played for some 50 years at Rancho Mirage in California — by jumping into the water. It's not Poppie's Pond, but it will have to do. The 18th hole opened for public play over the weekend.
Memorial Park also hosts the Houston Open held two weeks before the Masters.
The Australian All Abilities Open starts Wednesday at Sandhurst Club in Melbourne, an important step in golf’s efforts to join the Paralympic Games in Brisbane in 2032. It will be the first competition under the International Golf Federation's new classification rules that were developed in consultation with the International Paralympic Committee. ... Three-time major champion Minjee Lee remains in a slump. She finished last at the Toto Classic, 37 shots behind the winner, and had failed to make the cut in six straight tournaments before the Asian swing, where there are no 36-hole cuts. ... Nathan Charnes, general manager of WingHaven Country Club in Missouri, was elected to a two-year term as the 45th president of the PGA of America at the annual meeting last week in Las Vegas. Eric Eshleman was elected vice president and Jaren Barnes was elected secretary.
Blades Brown is the fourth consecutive winner of the World Wide Technology Championship to shoot 63 in the final round.
“We’ve got to stop blaming LIV for me playing poorly at the majors." — Jon Rahm, runner-up at the PGA Championship, missed cut at the U.S. Open and out of the top 30 at the other two majors.
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